In our continuous effort to improve the deviantART experience, we're publishing weekly Site Updates to keep members informed and to gather feedback. Below is a list of recent changes to the site, bug fixes, and feedback that was brought up by members in the last Site Update.

What's New

Introducing Madefire Motion Books on deviantART

We are excited to announce a partnership between deviantART and Madefire, the leading Motion Book application in Apple’s App Store. Together with Madefire, we are releasing the Madefire Web Reader on deviantART in a new Motion Books category on our front-page. In addition, Madefire's Motion Tool will gradually be made available to deviants in the coming months, so that deviants can buy, read, make, and sell books and comics, all from within the deviantART experience.

deviantART's T-Shirts and Gear Shop is Closing

After 8 years of artistic adventure, deviantART's T-Shirts & Gear Shop (formerly deviantWEAR) has decided to close its doors. It has been an amazing ride. Seeing hundreds of concepts through to full production, developing the brand hand-in-hand with the community, listening to all of the feedback, and designing to suit our deviants' dynamic tastes has been an honor. We have genuinely enjoyed sharing our concepts, workflow, designs, and final products with you. We would like to thank all of you for your support, heartfelt commentary, and constant tide of love and deviousness. It was certainly a labor of love to produce the brand for deviants around the globe.

Change Log

An "example deviations" section was added to the Commissions widget. Added by adahacker

Webfonts were not loading all of the requested font weights. Fixed by kemayo

The toolbar would not respond if no text was selected. Fixed by kemayo

When searching in the sidebar, results could display incorrectly. Fixed by inazar

When leaving comments in Sta.sh, image attachments were hidden by default. Fixed by inazar

The "undo" and "redo" buttons could be misaligned when leaving comments in Sta.sh. Fixed by inazar

Submitting two comments in Sta.sh without reloading the page could make selecting thumbs from the sidebar not work properly. Fixed by inazar

When leaving comments in Sta.sh, the scroll position would not be retained after closing the sidebar. Fixed by inazar

When splitting blockquotes in Firefox, the second half of the text would be lost. Fixed by Alisey

Uploading files to Sta.sh from the sidebar by clicking "Upload Files" wasn't working in Firefox. Fixed by Alisey

Uploading several files to Sta.sh at once from the sidebar could cause display issues. Fixed by Alisey

Your Feedback

Thank you for the feedback left on last week's Site Update! Here's some of what you had to say.

Feedback regarding Gallery Stats varied. Some deviants mentioned that they found the Comment information to be useful, while others mentioned that they found the breakdown of Favourites to be most useful.

A few deviants mentioned that the Timeline section of the Gallery Stats page is unclear.

alex-heberling and mirz-alt suggested that being able to track what websites are directing traffic to one's deviations would be helpful.

Yoriden suggested that a comparison of Views from one deviation to another would be useful, to go along with Comments and Favourites.

Several deviants liked the suggestion about being able to post a Journal from one's Profile.

Discuss!

Premium Content

The Premium Content Platform allows deviants to buy and sell high quality digital downloads. As a buyer of Premium Content, what content are you most interested in purchasing, and why are you interested in that content? For sellers, what do you find to be the most fruitful content that you offer for downloads?

Have a suggestion, idea, or feedback? Leave a comment on this article!Want to keep track of known issues? Check out our Status Forum!Find a bug?Report it to the Help Desk! (Be as detailed as possible!)

Umm, the submit page isn't working for me at all anymore, I used to be able to write in there directly and use the stash app to get y deveations in there. I would take a screen shot but I'm doing everything from my Coby Internet. Please fix the submit page so I can get back to writing and uploading, I have commisions I need to upload!

Madefire motion books are amazing. I think everybody should at least try Captain Stone Is Missing. the last time I read a book was in my grade-school days but now it's new and exciting. Liam Sharp is an amazing writer, and everybody who worked on the comic did a fantastic job. Captain Stone is amazing.

We're sad the shop is closing too, but we look forward to new experiences and a moving in new directions. If you do consider making a first time purchase, many of the high quality deviantART Gear Bags are currently 60-70% Off. They are $25 each.

That still doesn't explain the reason behind closing. Was it cause not many people bought stuff? Was it because there were some kind of issues with the store? Was DA losing more money than gaining by buying and printing the merchandise? Like what exactly was the reason behind this decision?

That is true. Ultimately, there are limits to how much information we can share. However, this was not a decision that we came to lightly and we do thank you for showing so much interest in the product.

I have a question. I understand that we can make Motion Book comics and sell them as premium content on DA, but what if I want to reach out to wider audience outside of DA? And when I invite them to come to look at some of my Motion Book comics on my DA gallery, they might be a bit confused by premium content platform - because we have to purchase them with points only, yet they can't or won't want to become members of Deviant Art just to buy points in order to purchase Motion Book comics. Am I making sense? That is what I am a bit concerned about.

It probably has already been suggested, but I would like that if premium content can be purchased via paypal or some other payment methods, not just points only, if we wanted to reach out to potential buyers out of DA.

Because of the current low transactional values of most of the purchases within Premium Content, the costs of accepting Credit Cards or PayPal outweigh the benefits. However, as this product evolves, we do hope to enable these and perhaps even some other billing options.

How about adding an option on the front page with something like.. "Popular 3 hours"? That time should be long enough to filter out most of the crap less interesting "works", but short enough to actually give some lesser artists some sunshine without them being drenched by all hotshots.

I like where you're going with this, In fact I completely agree this. Ever since the day I joined DA I've felt about the same way, why is it always the "same old artists" taking up up the spotlight?

Not to rip on photography, but the front page is always taken up by same 3 works of arts done by the "same old artists", photography, and anime or anime related works, and My Little Pony fan art. Enough is enough. There is rarely ever any other works of art worth giving a second glance at.

I swear that some these photos on that make it to the front page, I feel that even I could do a better job executing them myself and even then subjects that they capture are as generic as the artwork that makes it to the front page itself. Then you've got some dumb half-ass art's and crafts or digital art stupid animations that makes it to the front page, and artist posts a comment down below saying "It only took me 15 minutes to make."

"What The Serious Fuck?" How in the hell is it that these works of art crap strung together with no effort make it to the front page?

So, what these "popular artists" do, once they finally become popular or get a huge fan base, is that they just all of a sudden say, "Eh fuck it, I'm already popular I already know that my shit will automatically make it to the front page, why bother putting any effort or meaning into it?" and post these halfhearted works of art.

That tells me, as a small-time artist that even though I bust my ass to create my own personal master pieces and sometimes invest large quantities of money in certain pieces, that my art will never amount to anything. My artwork will always be buried behind the thousands of same old generic works of art.

It's nice to know that I'm not the only one out there that shares the same opinion about the front page.

Well, yes it is. But not even close to how eyeburning the very low quality things is. Also it would be an option you know, so you don't have to use it.

My base thought about this is that I would want to see a bit more dynamic front page. I mean, we get the most popular stuff from pretty big artists and are stuck with those for almost the whole day.

I would gladly trade all the greater artists for some intermediate artists that is updated more often instead, that way you could find more artists that isn't plastered all over the front page every day. Popular artists would indeed be on the 3 hours too, but for a shorter while. Again, giving a more dynamic showcase.

If you're interested, you can see my other reply to someone here [link]

I really wish there was a better way to get rid of lower quality art. For a start I would remove all those females that posts such horrible quality webcam pics which their mothers would tear down if they knew were on the internet.

Crap 'art' will always be there

It won't be like the newly submitted I agree, because that has nothing to do with popularity and just floods with stuff. It's impossible to look through it changes so quickly.

I understood what you're after though and I agree. What will change is that there will be more art changing throughout the day. And there will be more changeover - but shorter time for popular people means there is shorter time for the less popular, so ultimately there will still be popular people at the top, and if anything less popular persons like myself won't have enough time to make it to visible portions. Even not at the very top and with just about 400 watchers, my photos make the most of the 8 hours they are visible there.

Then again if I was a popular artist, I would find it unfair that suddenly I stop getting all the attention I used to get - after all I'd be working just as hard as anyone else to get and have gotten my work where it is (of course there are some who just end up popular for some unknown reasons...). Who will draw the line between who is popular and not, you know what I mean? (I know there are some popular artists whose work you can identify straight away as soon as you see whatever they posted on the popular 8 hours page before even checking) And what if through this system you've devised, someone becomes 'popular' and their art no longer shows up on a larger scale because of this? It's a bit more complicated than you've put it...

Well, it's not like I want the 8h option to be removed, I just would like to see an option with shorter time span for. I have it hard to imagine why the attention you get would decrease, because if you manage to hit the 8h popularity, you're still there like if nothing happened.I would almost dare to say you could possibly get more attention. I mean if some of your works doesn't really reach up to the 8h, you'd probably still get some sunshine in the 3/4/5/h option.

There is a lot of people out there who deserve more attention then what they get. If they don't reach up to the "8h club" they won't be seen at all, except for the second they're on the newest page. And if they get the attention they deserve in the 3/4/5h, they could eventually reach up to 8h, and later even 24h.Yes there will be big artists there as well, no doubt about it. But I imagine that it will be more gaps in those the shorter the time is than in the 8 or 24h options.I mean, in the 24h there is pretty much biggies alone, in 8h not as many. Following that pattern I could assume there would be even less of them in a shorter option.

So no. Popular artists won't get less attention, but lesser artists will get more. And I see no reason why they shouldn't get a chance.

I don't know, by chance I've found some decent works of art in the newly submitted section that can out-do at least a 1/3 or more of the popular 8, 12, and 24 hour "artwork" that still can't get many more than 10 page views and no more than 3 favorites.

I think what's sad is that traditional artwork isn't as popular as it used to be. Anymore you don't see hardly any good traditional art pieces or good crafts make it to the front page, and when I say "good traditional art" I mean art with an original subject that is NOT digitally rendered, NOT all anime, NOT all fan dubs, nor it is all photography.

I completely agree, there are artists that I happen to stumble upon that are absolutely fantastic, that are more realistic in nature and *just for the sake of a simple example* have maybe 2k pageviews, but an artist that has an anime/manga type of style can get massive amounts of views and everything that comes along with it - watchers, faves, and such.

Honestly I think that the 8hr page is the best option that we have so far, but I'm thinking that if there is anything less than that there will be a very frequent flow of work - not necessarily a bad thing, but not a really good thing either. Because of the volume of the amount of users that there are on the site, and how many pieces are getting uploaded all the time, I just think that as time progresses it will become very much like the new page where there are difficulties finding many decent things.

Yes I know, personally I use 8 hours. But as I said, I find that the 8h option is always flooded with greater artists, and then you are stuck with those for pretty much the rest of the day. With a shorter timespan I would imagine that the image flow wouldn't be as static due to it being updated more often.

I don't think it'd be the same as newly submitted, I hope not. Because that is updated all the time and has noting with popularity to do, and thus you get all kinds of... Eyeburning things thrown in your face.

The 3 hour part is only an example, it could be 4 or 5 for that matter. Bottom line is that I'd like to see an option where I don't have to see the same stuff for 8 hours, and at the same time be spared the very low quality things.

If deviantWEAR is closing, would it be possible (as a little replacement) for prints to be made available as T-shirts?...or thermoses... As I'd have bought a print thermos long ago, but I only use mugs mostly while camping with my Boy Scout troop, and I'd rather not buy a ceramic mug just to have it get broken at camp. ...I guess plastic mugs would be great too....But I digress...It would be great if prints could be bought as T-shirts... I've quite a few designs (only 1 or 2 of them on dA) that I really want to get as T-shirts for myself and some friends.

I personally wish that 1 Month and 3 Month prepaid Memberships could still be bought for oneself, not just for gifting to others. I checked a little while ago, and it was still an option, but when I went online today to renew my PM, it was no longer an option. I guess I won't be able to buy one at all now, because I can't afford a 12 Month or 24 Month PM. Even if I could afford it, I liked the short-term prepaid options, because I don't even know how often I'll be online a year or two later. Even though one-month and 3-Month prepaid were more expensive, they were easier for me because I was sure I would be making the most of it.